


The Failures of Reverse Engineering

by jerseydevious



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Gen, the joe chill of good writing declared me an enemy of the state and murdered me at quiznos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-30
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2019-02-08 16:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12868050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: My baby, my blood, my honest truth: entreat me not to leave thee, for whither thou goest I will go. Where I lodge, we lodge together. Where I die, you’ll be buried at last.





	The Failures of Reverse Engineering

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty sure the meaning of life in general isn't reading a book and suddenly turning everything you see into shitty Batman fanfiction, but it's sure as hell the meaning of my life in specific
> 
> (A massive, massive thanks to audreycritter on tumblr for letting me message her and ask how writing works, and What Stuff Do, and How Do Function)

For a moment, Jason thought he’d won. Bruce’s reflection in the glass was cold and inscrutable, shadows like black ink carving deep ravines into his expression. Bruce had an arresting face, too intense to look at directly; his eyes were set deep behind his brows, which were always pulled together like magnetized flecks of iron. His eyes were constantly hidden in shadow, hooded even more, perhaps, than when he wore the cowl. 

 

Tonight, it was almost as if he were looking at a photograph of a man, rather than a living being;  _ the lack of color adds to the somber nature of the piece, _ he might’ve said, looking at a glossy capture hung on a glossier frame in a gallery somewhere, somewhen.  _ This piece haunts me.  _ He couldn’t even see Bruce breathe. 

 

Then Bruce rumbled, “Jason,” like the dark cloud of a thunderstorm, and the illusion of success was broken.

 

Jason crossed his arms. “What gave it away?” 

 

“You’re heavy on your feet.”

 

“Heavy on my—you trained me, you ass. I’m  _ dead _ silent,” Jason said, leveling a glare at Bruce’s stone-still back. “How could you have even—liar. You’re a liar, you have sensors.”

 

“You’re favoring your right leg just slightly. Twisted it on patrol. Don’t want me to know about it, but I do.” 

 

Jason scowled. “I hate you.”

 

“Hnh.”

 

“How’d you even learn to do that?” Jason asked. “Listen that carefully.”

 

Bruce jerked, then, just a twitch of the shoulder. Even that seemed tight; controlled, like a movement orchestrated to appeal to Jason’s pathos. He could hear it in his mind now, Bruce’s weird robot brain firing synapses faster than Jason could fire bullets:  _ move, appear bothered. You are human. You are human. You are— _

 

“You mean, why didn’t I teach you.” 

 

_ —human. _

 

Jason shrugged. “Call it what you want.”

 

Bruce was silent for a moment. “Learned it in Russia. For four days, every sense but one is deprived. The cycle repeats.”

 

“For how long?”

 

“Two months.”

 

“You do realize that’s sensory deprivation,” Jason said, quietly.  _ Human my ass, _ he thought. “A form of torture?” 

 

Bruce shifted, turning just to the side so Jason could catch the downward curve of his mouth. Shadows spilled from the corner of his lip into wrinkles that were slowly carving their own home on Bruce’s face, on foundations carved from stress and time. If Jason let his eyes wander upwards, he’d find crows’ feet spiderwebbing outward from Bruce’s eyes, but Jason was not a person who allowed himself to be unfocused. “Do you have a point, Jason?”

 

“I forgot what my point was,” Jason said, strolling forward. “Because I can’t stop thinking about what the hell that’s still doing there.”

 

“Why the interest,” Bruce said. His voice sounded like the grind of stone against steel—a little something hard, a little something ugly, a little something cracked up the middle. Somewhere in the dark, a pair of bats squabbled, and the Batcomputer gleefully sang a note that meant some asinine update was complete. “You’ve never mentioned it. If you have, it wasn’t to me.”

 

Jason shrugged. “I didn’t have to see it, then. Now, I think it’s kind of fucking morbid.”

 

Bruce turned to look at him. There was one eye Jason could see, gray as a rainy dawn. The other still hid beneath its shroud. If it could be believed, there was a time when Bruce’s eyes had been blue. Like something had come along and sucked the color out of them. Whatever parasite had sucked the pigment from his eyes, it must have also taken it from his hair, which seemed to be more of a slate gray than an ebony black, these days. “Does it… Jason. Does it bother you. In—as in, triggering.”

 

“Never bothered me before,” Jason said, a tad too casual for the subject. “Not in that way, I guess. But the more I look at it, the more fucked up it becomes, y’know? Like a Michael Bay movie, when halfway through you realize the whole thing’s shot with sexist writing and framing.”

 

“This is a good deal more fucked up than a Transformer movie, I should think.”

 

Soft  _ f, _ hard  _ k— _ perfect, cookie-cutter pronunciation. Such a weird thing, to hear Bruce use foul language. It was not of his world.

 

Jason pulled the catch on his helmet and tucked it beneath his arm. The cold air smoothed his skin. If he closed his eyes and let himself wander, he’d think of nights standing tall above the city with only a mask to guard him from it, poised at the lip of a rooftop to fall into the river of wind below and soar over the concrete bed. 

 

“No shit, Mr. Detective. I’m standing here thinking when that Batcomputer goes dark, the first thing you see is the suit I died in hanging over your shoulder. The first thing you see when the lights come on is that thing, up in thin air. The first thing you see when you get back is, guess what, the monument you built to your own damn guilt.”

 

Bruce was silent, still staring at the green domino in front of him, like he could will the ash of time to rise up and form into the body of the boy who filled it. Curious, how Bruce was so concerned with the body, when the soul of the boy who’d worn that mask was looking right over his shoulder. Maybe he’d find that that green mask could still wrap perfectly around that soul, if he’d just turn around. If he even could.

 

“Don’t go thinking this was a monument to me,” Jason said. “If you ever thought it was, you knew nothing about me.”

 

Bruce breathed out, loud enough for Jason to just barely pick it up. “I still have the clothes I was wearing when my parents—I didn’t know what to do with them, when I got home that night. I didn’t sleep. Didn’t want to be with Alfred, either. So I spent that night prying up a floorboard, and I stuffed my clothes in that. What I mean—what I mean to say is, this is not the suit you were murdered in. This is one of your spares. I have… I have the other one upstairs. Beneath the floorboard.”

 

“Gee whillikers, Bruce,” Jason murmured. Something keen and cold and vicious had been stuck through Jason’s belly, bleeding him slowly, but what, he couldn’t decide. A knife could never cut that deep.

 

Bruce’s voice was hollow when he spoke again. “Family tradition.”

 

Jason shook his head. “Don’t get this sideways. That’s not a  _ family _ tradition. That’s a  _ you  _ tradition. That’s your _ —weird— _ twisted way of doing things, not mine, not dear old gran and gramp’s, yours.”

 

“You want me to take it down,” Bruce growled.  _ Human, _ the little imaginary Bruce-bots squeaked.  _ You are human! You are human! Raise: hackles, evoke: emotion! _ “But it doesn’t bother you. Tell me. How does that work?”

 

“It doesn’t,” Jason snapped. “It’s the idea behind it that—that…”

 

_ You are human! You are human! Look now at your blood dashed upon the floor! _

 

“It’s the idea that—” Jason licked his lips. Scrubbed at his jaw. Worried his teeth with his tongue. “See, see, you did teach us, actually. How to listen. Heightened our senses. You passed it along, just with a little less psychological torture. Jesus fucking Christ, Bruce, go lay down on one of the cots.”

 

Bruce, for whatever incredible reasoning passed for logic in his rusted head, didn’t protest. He turned to shuffle to the medbay, and as he did, the coal streak of his cape billowed, revealing a gauntlet pressed to a sea of blood that twirled in ribbons down his leg. Jason thought of the sucking noise he’d heard, the sound of fingers plugged in a ragged wound being popped out. No barrier between the life force and the open, dead air.

 

Jason bustled around the cabinets, pulling out disinfectant, some gauze. Silk line for the stitches, a needle. “You’re a dumbass.”

 

“Hnh. Not arguing.”

 

Jason chuckled, but he stopped abruptly when he saw the look on Bruce’s face—more accurately, the lack of it. Straight, hard mouth, sharp jaw scored by stubble, skin like sun-baked bones; a cold, unfeeling face. 

 

Jason folded himself into a chair, popping off the abdominal armor and peeling back the blood-slicked undersuit. He cleared his throat. “Y’know, I actually didn’t come over to fight.”

 

“Really.”

 

“Yes, really, you unbelievable ass. I… had an announcement.”

 

Bruce’s milky eyes flicked over everything but Jason’s face, calculating. “What?”

 

“I’m, ah,” Jason said, threading the needle through Bruce’s skin. “I’m, ah, I’m going to college, next semester.”

 

“You took the identity,” Bruce whispered.  _ Whispered— _ his voice was paper thin. Bruce’s hand fumbled its way past the mountains and valleys of the cot’s bunched sheets, wrapped around his. It would have been sweet, if it wasn’t equal parts sticky and stiff with blood, and Jason wasn’t trying to zipper up the gaping hole in Bruce’s side. 

 

_ Jacob Peters, _ Bruce had named him.  _ I wonder if he’ll ever call me ‘Jay’ again, _ Jason had thought.  _ I’ll cut his tongue out.  _ But the thought had been half-hearted even to his own mind.

 

“I did,” Jason said, quietly. “Just GCU. Figure I ought to try it.”

 

“GCU is a fine school.”

 

Jason snorted. “You only say that because that have that all-nighter cookie shop, and the owner isn’t scared out of his wits at the sight of you, and lets you sit on the roof.”

 

“He thinks seeing me around will...  _ inspire _ the kids.”

 

“You mean he doesn’t want to get robbed by a bunch of cookie-deprived college-age delinquents, so he lets you sit on the roof every now and then and eat half his stock of double chocolate chip.”

 

“I said inspiration.”

 

Jason tied the wound closed. The stitches crawled a good distance over Bruce’s pale, scar-crossed skin, an army of spiders marching up and up and up. “I’m gonna pack this up, but before I do, got any other festering wounds you’re too dumb to say anything about for me?”

 

“I’m happy for you,” Bruce murmured. Jason covered the wound in gauze, and then rolled the undersuit back down. Bruce swung his legs over the edge of the cot almost immediately after Jason had finished. He sat there for a minute, gauntlets leaving bloody handprints over the snow white sheets, turned away from where Jason was perched on his stool. “I’ll talk to Alfred. We’ll… celebrate.”

 

After a minute, an idea occurred to him, one that lit the fire of the ugly anger that lived in him and was the only one who had never left him, and Jason said, “We can celebrate right now.” He hefted the stool over his shoulder, and just as Bruce was yelling at him to stop, swung it into the mocking-gleaming glass like a baseball bat.

 

The stool caught the Robin suit, carrying it across the Cave in a shower of glittering crystal. Thick shards of glass reflected back at him the ceiling, writhing with fluttering bats that had been startled by the crash.

 

The look on Bruce’s face was nearly radioactive. “What the  _ hell  _ did you just do?” His voice seemed to shake the Cave; the bats squealed, wheeling about in the air, like servants scrambling out of the way of the king’s ire.

 

Jason turned around, afraid if he looked at the blunt object pinning down Robin’s suit, surrounded by all its broken things, he’d remember a very different time, and a very different place. “Celebrated. I just held a full conversation with you, and I felt I needed a little destruction therapy.”

 

“Destruction therapy,” Bruce said quietly. The quiet was when he was the worst—his yelling could be ignore. His quiet sank into the flesh like the teeth of acid, which was, maybe, what made Batman’s act bladder-loosening. “Property damage, you mean.”

 

Jason shook his head hard enough for wisps of hair to tickle his forehead. “Nah. Here’s the thing—nothing in that case was yours, right? That suit didn’t belong to you even when you gave it to me. The only thing you own is your guilt.”

 

Bruce stalked forward, painfully slow. A panther, going in for the kill. The unsettling part was watching the look on its face as it sized up the meat on its prey, listened for the blood rushing through its jugular. “The only thing in that case that was mine was my guilt.”

 

Jason stared into his eyes, and this time, Bruce glared right back. “I understand you don’t think of it this way. Possibly, you never will. But I do. The suit inside that case? Was my boy’s. That was what my son wore.  _ My _ child,  _ my _ baby, even if you weren’t mine by blood. Don’t you ever dare tell me otherwise. Don’t you dare.”

 

Jason’s eyes were burning. So was his throat, and his chest, all the way down to his heart. “Liar. Fucking liar. You  _ replaced _ me, you stone-cold, sociopathic, nuts-off-your-fucking-rocker—”

 

“Stop,” Bruce snapped. There was a vein in his temple that was throbbing. “If you think there was anything on this Earth, or any of them, that could replace you, you’re a damn fool.”

 

“If you think plucking up another Robin after me wasn’t somehow a replacement, you’re crazier than I thought,” Jason snarled, pushing forward. 

 

Bruce’s nostrils flared. “I said  _ stop.” _

 

“With what? The truth? The truth that that’s what it felt like, to see someone else in my suit? Betrayal? Here’s the truth, Bruce. I did think of you as my father. How sweet of me. How naive of me. I knew you loved me, because whatever thing is so wrong with you now that you have to act like the machine who grew flesh, I just didn’t see it then. I saw right through you, and then it turns out I didn’t.”

 

_ I didn’t,  _ the Cave echoed back at him.  _ I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t. You are human, you are human, you are human. _

 

Then it was the two of them, backing away, breathing hard like a pair of thoroughbreds after the roar of the race was over. They watched each other only out of the corners of their eyes, heavy with the knowledge that they’d each said just enough to crack the fragile balance they had spent so long building.

 

“Maybe if you’d trained me like you were trained in Russia,” Jason said, “I’d have seen it earlier.”

 

“Maybe if I hadn’t trained in Russia, I’d know what the hell I’m doing,” Bruce answered.

 

Jason flopped back on the ground, glass crunching beneath him. Wearily, Bruce lowered himself to the ground a few feet away from him. That was the difference, between now and then; now, they stayed together after the shouting, to try and puzzle out what exactly it was they’d shouted into the thin air over each other’s shoulders. Two trained detectives, tasked with the ultimate mystery:  _ what is the human condition? _

 

“Talk about that.”

 

Bruce made a weird, aborted gesture with his hand. “Basics. Shot to the mouth to keep my tongue numb, chemical spray to keep from being able to feel anything. Earmuffs. Blindfold. A little snap to keep out smells.”

 

Jason looked at him blandly. “Bruce. I was asking about your feelings. We’re having a true-blue feelings chat, right now, and I really have no interest in knowing the ways you’ve managed to torture yourself. I was asking how you felt.”

 

Other than a, “hnh,” Bruce didn’t respond, not that Jason had really expected him to. 

 

Jason blew out a breath. “I’ll tell you how I felt, after I saw Tim in the costume. I was angry. Angry like you wouldn’t believe, like I could just dream of taking my thumbs and just gouging out your eyes. Anger beyond your wildest dreams. I tried to kill you, even. Strapped a bomb to the Batmobile.”

 

“I knew.”

 

Jason whipped his head around. “You knew? There was no way in hell you could’ve—damn you. I can never win with you, huh? So even if I had pressed that button, you would’ve walked away.”

 

Bruce slowly shook his head.

 

Now his eyes were cold, and so was his throat, and his chest, all the way down to his heart. “You didn’t disable it.”

 

“I did not.”

 

The Batcomputer chirped again. Jason flicked a piece of glass, and it sailed away, tinkling among its starry siblings.  _ Look at your blood dashed upon the floor. _ The words between them remained unspoken. “As long as we’re together, old man,” Jason murmured. “Together.”

 

“That’s what I was thinking,” Bruce said. “Here, years ago. When Bane threw me through the case, I thought he was going to kill me. That I’d see you again.”

 

“I knew Bane broke in. I don’t know what he did.”

 

“Broke my spine.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“It was... uncomfortable.”

 

_ I had known,  _ was what Jason didn’t say.  _ I knew Bane had broken your spine. I knew he reached inside you and pulled out the gears and crushed them to dust, I knew because I hacked your medical records to make sure some disease wasn’t going to nab you before I did. I know you forgave him. I know you let him in this house again, I know you funded his bullshit search to better himself. I  _ know _ you’re a dumbass. _

 

Jason stood, dusted glass off of himself. “I’ve gotta run. Dick needed me for something, don’t know what yet. I enjoyed my celebration.”

 

“If you had asked,” Bruce said, hauling himself to his feet, “I would have taken it down.”

 

“I would’ve never asked. And because you won’t, either—when you told me to stop, you weren’t telling me to stop speaking. You were telling me to stop calling you crazy. See, I never knew it bothered you. But it makes sense.”

 

Jason picked up his helmet, pushed it on his head. “It makes sense because there’s nothing in this world you hate more than being alone, and stuff like that, it makes you feel like you’re all alone. You push people away because you’ve got some unfathomable need to put yourself through some sort of pain all the time, but even you have a limit, right? You draw the line at being told you fundamentally can’t be anything other than alone. I get that. But I wanted to tell you, I wasn’t just angry, when I first saw Tim. I felt like you’d abandoned me. Like I was all alone.”

 

Bruce looked at him again, eyes glancing over his face, and then his bloodied hand was squeezing Jason’s shoulder. “I’m… sorry. Sorry you felt like that.”

 

Jason ducked his head, because his throat was tight, and he felt the tears sting at his eyes. “Thanks.”

 

Jason broke away, somewhat unwillingly, and trudged to the foot of the stairs. Just before he disappeared into the shadows of the stairwell, Bruce called out, “Oh, and Jason?”

 

“Hm?” He turned to look at Bruce, who looked as steady as if he’d been carved out of marble, the scalloped edges of the cape leaching out into the darkness and drawing it towards him.

 

“In a family this size, it’s hard to be alone.”

 

Jason stared, and nodded, and then took the stairs two at a time, because something like raw energy was running up his bones. In case Bruce was still listening, Jason sent his message to Dick as a text:  _ I need you to get something out of B’s room. It’s under one of the floorboards. _

 

Dick’s reply was almost instant:  _ Why? _

 

_ You can sneak up on him. _

**Author's Note:**

> AM I A REAL BATMAN WRITER NOW, SANDRA. I DID IT. I DID THE THING. I BROKE THE CASE. IT'S BROKEN. 
> 
> Anyway, as usual, you can @ me @jerseydevious on tumblr, or twitter, but don't look at either of those, also. I embarrass myself at a frequent rate. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
